The Asian Age
February 24, 2014
Beijing loses its poise when international leaders meet the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s great religious figure and traditional ruler who fled his homeland in the face of Chinese takeover and repression in the ’50s to live in India.
After last Friday’s White House meeting between US President Barack Obama and the Tibetan dignitary — they had also met in 2010 and 2011, angering the Chinese leadership each time — Beijing went ahead and expressed its “strong indignation”. But no one can take this posture seriously.
China has done little in the last six decades to sort out its Tibet mess, except to seek to make the Buddhist area fall in line through severe repression. The communist leaders refuse to discuss the problem with the Tibetan people and stubbornly try to treat the Dalai Lama as a non-person. Tibet’s India-based high priest has long made it known that he does not aspire to Tibet’s independence and preaches the “middle path” of autonomy.
Officially, the US, arguably the world’s most influential country, and India, which has a boundary dispute with a muscle-flexing China, also do not support independence for Tibet. And yet Beijing professes to be suspicious. This is just a stance. In reality, Beijing’s little trick is to wait for the Dalai Lama’s end. After that it believes Tibet won’t have a rallying figure. But China must learn to appreciate that repression cannot yield a satisfactory resolution of a very serious problem. And with policies such as these, it can never be an appealing place for others.
